A point of sale or service device is a widely used electronic device in retail industry nowadays, and is mainly used for managing products and the customer information. Generally speaking, a point of sale or service (POS) device is usually installed on a cashier desk in a convenience store, a shop or a supermarket for displaying information and the sum of price of merchandise purchased by consumers, so it is convenient for a cashier to operate and avoid errors that might occur in the checkout process.
Please refer to FIG. 1, which is a schematic perspective view of a conventional POS device. The POS device 1 comprises a screen body 11, a bracket base 12 and a host computer (not shown), the host computer is set up inside the screen body 11, and assembled with the components of mother board, hard disk, and/or memory, for executing calculation and saving merchandise information, such as the amount of merchandise, the price of merchandise, the stock of merchandise, or the gross profit, etc. In the meanwhile, the cashier can read the merchandise information which is displayed on the screen.
Furthermore, as the consumer demand varies, the additional functions provided by the POS device 1 are increasing, and that is to say, the amount of components inside the POS device 1 or the amount of peripheral devices are getting more. For example, a magnetic stripe reader device 13 is disposed on a lateral side of the screen body for charging a card. Meanwhile, it leads to some difficulties during the repair process. For example, if the POS device malfunctions or fails in booting while being used, it is hard for the user or a service engineer to readily identify the failed one or ones among the large amount of components. Therefore, the service engineer has no choice but to disassemble the POS device 1 and check components one by one to find out the failed one or ones. Actually, it takes much time for trouble shooting.
Furthermore, when the service engineer analyzes the POS device 1, it is hard for the service engineer to accurately find out the reason why the component fails only with the information of factory data, such as the model type, the specification and the manufactured date, etc. On the contrary, if the service engineer can get further more information about the failed component, such as the usage time, the number of uses and the failure rate, etc., the device engineer can carry on the reliability analysis more effectively.
Here are some patents relevant to trouble shooting cases. Wherein, Taiwan utility model Patent Number 291039 discloses a trouble shooting device, used with an electronic equipment having a BIOS, diagnosing which hardware device is breakdown by checking the codes generated by the BIOS during a hardware inspecting process. However, the BIOS is only suitable for the troubling shooting of the hardware relative to the motherboard, and the breakdown status of the display, hard disk, the peripheral device and the information of usage cannot be obtained via the BIOS.
Furthermore, Chinese Patent Number 102023917 discloses a computer system, as shown in FIG. 2. The computer system 2 utilizes an embedded controller 202 disposed therein to couple to a plurality of electronic modules (Dynamic Random Access Memory module 22, frequency generator 23, BIOS 24, input output control chip 25, central processing unit 26) thereof, and the embedded controller 202 is used for writing the collected information S22˜S26 of the plurality of electronic modules into the memory module 200 when the computer system 2 is in a power-on state. Therefore, the service engineer may refer to the information saved in the memory module 200 to analyze why the computer system 2 was breakdown. Moreover, the patent further discloses that if the embedded controller is isolated from the computer system 2 as a component disposed in a monitoring device, the embedded controller may sift the collected information S22˜S26 of the electronic modules in advance, and then write the sifted information S202 into the memory module.
However, in markets, there are not any data record products, especially designed for being used with a POS device, existing. In view of this, the above issues should be addressed.